Best Food Writing 2011

by Holly Hughes

  Steak Without Compromise

  Consider the rib eye steak. Let’s say you want it perfectly medium rare inside—129 degrees—but crusty on the outside. Myhrvold’s recipe calls for cooking the steak for an hour at 131 degrees in steam mode in the combi oven until the core temperature reaches 129. Then the steak is dried without humidity at three different temperatures for 25 minutes to prepare for the sear.

  This sounds nuts to traditionalists on many levels, not least of which is cooking a steak at 131 degrees. Compare this to broiling it in the oven at temperatures closer to 500 degrees.

  “The traditional method is to say, ‘Use one approach and try to achieve two goals that are totally contradictory,’” Myhrvold says. “You can kind of balance them, but it’s always a trade-off. The modern approach says screw that. Instead of trying to do this as one step, let’s do it as two.”

  Of course, not too many cooks will splurge on an immersion circulator and vacuum machine, which run $800 to $1,000 or more, or a combi oven for $12,000, but Myhrvold likens those appliances to the microwave.

  “Microwaves started off wildly expensive,” he says, “and then they got popular and changed the way people reheat things. I think the same thing will happen for this kind of equipment. It will drop enormously in price.”

  Myhrvold delivers these kinds of statements with certitude, and who are we to argue? He has backed up his culinary claims with rigorous scientific tests, and when asked to explain them, does so clearly, never patronizing or getting frustrated.

  Admittedly, he’s been in the position of explaining his breakthroughs for most of his life to those of us not quite as bright—for those of us, say, whose first thought for how to eliminate global warming would not involve suspending sulfur-dioxide-emitting hoses 15 miles above the Earth.

  Science over Soul?

  But where we might push back is on the emotional level: Many devoted cooks would say that modernist cooking takes some of the joy out of our favorite pastime. His egg scrambling is antiseptic—no smell of foaming butter, no sound when the egg hits the pan, no pride when the eggs come out great. There’s just the lab-like whirring of a machine sitting on the counter and the guaranteed results of scientific precision.

  Myhrvold is unfazed.

  “There are chefs who say this takes the skill out of it, or the soul out of it,” he says. “And I say, ‘I don’t want to be a human thermostat.’ This digital device can be a thermostat way better than I can, and I find no dishonor in that.”

  This kind of precision cooking is more in line with the mentality of pastry chefs than it is with savory chefs, who often pride themselves on being able to pull steak out of the pan based on intuition and touch.

  “Pastry chefs bought into this notion of saying we have to measure things and be precise,” Myhrvold says. “They also bought into the notion that you can’t be a pastry chef without dealing with lots of little white powders. When you start using unconventional ingredients, like gellan or agar or methylcellulose, to a pastry chef it’s like, ‘OK, fine. I used to have 10 strange white powders. Now I have 20. So what?’”

  Methylcellulose? What about the approach epitomized by Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, who prefers minimal manipulation of natural ingredients?

  “There’s no way I’m going to stand up for bad ingredients,” Myhrvold replies. “We love seasonal ingredients. It’s a false dichotomy to say that modern cooking is at odds with that, but some people want to have a great ingredient and no technique.

  “I don’t think having a chef modify an ingredient is necessarily bad,” he says, listing bread, wine and cheese as examples of modified “natural” ingredients.

  Then it was time for breakfast. Myhrvold plated his sous-vide scrambled eggs and pastrami, and the Food & Wine staff gathered around to taste. After a chorus of “yums” from the staff and pleas from our editor to sell his homemade pastrami retail, he made his way out the door, immersion blender in hand.

  He was on his way to meet his mother for lunch at Chez Panisse.

  THE CASE FOR HANDWRITING

  By Deborah Madison

  From ZesterDaily.com

  Author of nearly a dozen books on vegetarian cooking, Deborah Madison represents the flip side of twenty-first-century cooking—farm-to-table, seasonal, locavore, Slow Food, in many ways the antithesis of Modernist cuisine. Connecting recipes to their human past is more her style.

  When I look at a recipe card I see the person who wrote it, and sometimes more.

  My petite grandmother penned—with a fountain pen—her recipe for raisin squares in an elegant script on pale crinkly blue airline stationery. A handwritten card for a stollen from a Flagstaff friend, her words covering a large lined card, reminds me of how much her warm and nourishing table meant during a long rough patch. My own 3-by-5 cards, intended to jar my memory, are sketchy and rough, clearly for me alone and not for sharing, just as personal foods are meant for one and not for others.

  Then there’s the big ebullient scrawl of my sister’s recipe for pasta with caramelized onions. Turning over the paper, I see that it was written on the back of a Chez Panisse menu from February l978 when we both worked there. Of course, I have to read the menu for the week, and as I do, hidden stories emerge. My parents, dangerously close to the end of their marriage, ate chicken Kiev there on the 14th. No hints of Italy had yet crept into the menu, and France was still the source of most dishes and ideas. The cost of a dinner was $12.50, and although the menu had been photocopied, it had been typed first; you can see that the “m’s” were a little faint, and the accent over the word puree was drawn in by hand.

  Handwritten Notes Capture a Memory

  I have a folder full of such papers, among them notes I took from a talk gardener Alan Chadwick had given at the end of his life, urging a handful of his students towards a practice of artistry in the kitchen. Those notes bring back the hushed expectancy of those of us who crowded his sickroom. We seemed to have held our breaths while he spoke about plants and food, grasping for words like “noyau” and stammering with frustration when he couldn’t find them. That’s when I heard him say, “Cooking is done in the garden. When that’s not complete, the gardening takes place in the kitchen”—words that have long served as my North Star.

  “Arrowroot is a weed; it grows in a bog and has charming flowers,” he said.

  “True rennet is an herb. Put a little handful in the milk and it goes solid,” he instructed.

  “For a sauce, take milk. Place onions, peeled and halved, peppercorns mixed spices. Simmer and let reduce for a half-hour. Strain.”

  The last is a technique I’ve used ever since for infusing milk with flavor.

  But it’s not just the content that matters. My typing errors reflect the urgency to get words down the way Alan had said them. The paper bears a watermark, and after 30 years it has a parchment-like feel. In addition to the words on the page, the spell of the moment also comes through, Alan’s anxious searching for words, his wish to transmit his wisdom before dying.

  There are other pages—quotes from “Memoirs of Hadrian,” Rilke’s sonnets (the ones involving fruit), a piece from Andre Simon about how medical science is now justifying the wisdom of eating more vegetables and less meat, all typed on the thin stationery from the American Academy in Rome when I was living there. Though faded, they still remind me what I was moved by then and why I copied these words.

  Excitement Transfers Through Paper

  Among the papers I was most happy to find were lists of dishes I wanted to cook at Greens, the San Francisco restaurant I headed up in the late 1970s. Handwritten on lined paper in brown notebooks, sometimes in ink, sometimes in pencil, are the names of recipes, doodles and question marks, references to authors and books, the suppliers of wild strawberries and especially good coffee, exclamation points flying when something really comes into focus as a great possibility. It’s a record of time spent fitting new thoughts together. At times it looks careful and deliberate. Othe
r times my hand gets distracted and strays, looks sloppy and tired. But mostly it conveys such a deep sense of discovery that reading through these notebooks, I am reinfected with the obsessive excitement I felt then. Would a list on my computer do the same thing? I’m not sure.

  I recently got a letter in the mail, a personal letter, my name and address written on a typewriter. I knew it was typed because typewritten letters are often uneven, except in the cases of strong, disciplined typists who press every letter evenly without fail. The typist of this envelope is 85 years old and he uses the Internet with ability, but the typewriter is the machine he loves. His wife shrugs it off when I mention my delight in this envelope, saying that he simply won’t give up his typewriter. Perhaps it’s stubbornness on his part not to give in entirely to electronics. I say “Bravo!” for there’s much to be said for the mark of the hand, whether expressed through penmanship or a typewriter. In fact, I’ve come to think of the typewriter as a kind of letterpress. Your fingers hit the keys and press the ink into the paper. Wham! Your weak fingers show up in the faded “a’s” and “z’s” where the ribbon didn’t get inked enough. Your strong-hitting forefingers make smudgy “t’s” and “y’s.” Ideally, all the letters should look the same, but because they don’t, I can recognize my (or another’s) typing as surely as I can recognize handwriting. And this connection of pen or typewriter key to paper to author is what makes me a firm believer in recipe cards, handwritten notes, and typed papers of all kinds.

  I hear the loud and whining protest from afar. “But Epicurious is so much easier when you want a recipe!”

  But recipe cards and other handwritten documents tell so much more of a story. Given the lack of typewriters today, may I suggest that you sit down and write out a favorite recipe and send it to someone. You may be surprised by the response you get.

  Persimmon Bars with Lemon Glaze

  This recipe, from Helen Potter, a friend and once the historian of Sutter Creek, Calif., makes a tender, cake-like bar filled with currants and drizzled with a tartsweet lemon glaze. Filled with spice and the color of pumpkin pie, these are a truly autumnal, a dessert to look forward to. For persimmons, use the large Hachiya variety, deadripe and as soft as jam.

  Makes about 32 bars

  Butter and flour for the pan

  1 cup dried currants

  1¾ cups unbleached white flour

  1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

  1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

  ¼ teaspoon ground cloves

  1 cup persimmon pulp, from 1 or 2 Hachiya persimmons

  1 teaspoon baking soda

  ¼ teaspoon salt

  1½ teaspoons lemon juice

  1 egg

  1 cup light brown sugar

  ½ cup melted unsalted butter or neutraltasting oil

  1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 10-by-14-inch baking pan. If the currants are dry and hard, cover them with warm water and set them aside while you assemble the other ingredients.

  2. Combine the flour with the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves in a bowl. In another bowl, beat the pulp until it is smooth, then stir in the soda, salt, lemon juice, egg, and sugar. Pour in the melted butter or oil.

  3. Gently stir the dry ingredients, a third at a time, into the wet. Make sure they are blended, but do not overmix. Drain the currants if they’ve been soaking, squeeze them dry, and stir them in along with the nuts. Spread the batter in the pan and bake until firm and lightly browned on top, 20 to 25 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and cool while you make the lemon glaze below. Dribble the glaze from the ends of a fork over the top, then cut into pieces. These soft, moist sweets keep well stored in an airtight tin.

  Lemon Glaze

  Juice of 1 lemon

  Approximately 1 cup powdered sugar

  1. Stir enough juice into the sugar to make it the texture of thick cream.

  THE FAMOUS RECIPE

  By Floyd Skloot

  From Colorado Review

  Award-winning poet, memoirist, and fiction writer Floyd Skloot sets out to unravel a mystery—a recipe published in the late 1950s by his mother, who never cooked a day in her life.

  She might as well have said she had a photograph of my mother turning cartwheels on the moon. Instead, and no less implausibly, Joan said she had a recipe my mother contributed to a cookbook in the late 1950s.

  Joan had been my brother’s fiancée forty-seven years ago and knew my mother never cooked. She may not have known my mother used the oven as an extra cabinet for stashing pots, pans, platters, and dishes, all wrapped in plastic, but she knew how unlikely it was for her ever to have prepared a dish called Veal Italienne “Sklootini.”

  My mother did, on occasion, make toast. She would open a can of fruit or container of cottage cheese or jar of jam, cut herself a chunk of Cracker Barrel cheddar to eat with crackers, pour milk into a bowl of cereal, prepare a cup of instant coffee sprinkled with Sweet’N Low. But the oven and stove as appliances for food production? That was not her world.

  She loved to eat, though. She ate slowly, accompanied by dramatic commentary and gesticulations: Oh! This is divine! She liked rich, creamy, saucy, elaborate presentations in restaurants, or as a guest at someone else’s table, and she wanted everything—from her brandy Alexander through her standing rib roast to her chocolate sundae—amply portioned. Except on weekends, and provided she didn’t have to do the cooking, she didn’t seem to mind eating at home, and her preferences remained intact until her death at ninety-five.

  One of the last memories I have of my mother comes from a moment a month before she died. My wife, Beverly, and I were with her as lunch was being served in the solarium of the nursing home’s memory impairment unit. Bathed in early spring light, her memory so shattered that she no longer knew who I was or who she herself was, limited to a diet of soft, bland food she barely touched, my mother waited for her mushy meal to appear. Though she barely spoke anymore, and never seemed to know where she was, she leaned close to me and said, “The chefs at this restaurant are very, very good.”

  Lo and Behold

  Joan also knew, firsthand, about my mother’s dedication to disastrous matchmaking, her zeal for bringing ill-suited partners together. This had resulted in my brother’s marrying someone else, someone my mother had found for him during his engagement to Joan. Before long, Joan married my basketball coach, without my mother’s help, and is still married to him.

  We’d lost touch, but a few years ago had begun an e-mail correspondence. Now, she wrote, she’d been “digging deep to find a certain recipe and lo and behold I found a very old recipe book from the East End Temple Young Married Set and there was a recipe from your mother.” I think she understood the startling nature of her discovery, which is why she prefaced it with “lo and behold,” as in, You’re about to witness the unimaginable! She concluded by saying the recipe was “very typical of her flamboyant personality” and offered to send me a copy.

  The book, mimeographed and plastic-comb bound, was called 130 Famous Long Beach Recipes. Joan had photocopied the cover and my mother’s recipe, which arrived sharing a page with Frieda Schwartz’s Day After Tongue and Rita Mintz’s Stuffed Cabbage. I didn’t recognize Veal Italienne “Sklootini” as something ever served in my home. Or tasted elsewhere. I wondered where she’d found it and why she’d chosen it over such equally fantastical dishes as, say, Shashlik Sklootovich or Chicken Papriskloot, which we also never encountered.

  The recipe itself was like the script for a deadpan Bob Newhart sketch. You do what to veal scallops? For how long? Look, Mrs. Skloot, is this some kind of joke? It looked and sounded like a recipe, it involved individually credible ingredients, but it read like a spoof.

  The very idea of my mother mincing four cloves of garlic, pounding and slicing raw meat, removing the lumps from two cans worth of Italian tomatoes, or enduring the possibility of tomato stains on the stove, struck me as absurd. Then there was the
math: two and a half pounds of veal, flattened and cut into two- or three-inch pieces, to be cooked for one hour and fifty minutes. I couldn’t imagine what would happen to thin strips of veal cooked that long. And what about the bay leaf listed among the ingredients but never discussed in the cooking directions? Those directions concluded with a serving recommendation: “I suggest that you make spaghetti, to serve an elegant Italian meal, as you will have enough extra sauce.”

  My mother’s recipe had seemed flamboyant to Joan, probably because of its faux French/Italian/Russian name alongside those traditional Jewish recipes for tongue and stuffed cabbage, its assertion of elegance, and the very outlandishness of its existence. But it was my mother’s audacity in offering a recipe, when she herself never cooked, that struck me as the wildest, showiest, most characteristic aspect of this magical news.

  But I had to wonder if I was remembering right. Did my mother really not cook, as I believed, or was memory deceiving me?

  So Much as a Toothpick

  I come from a large family of small families. My father was the third of six siblings who averaged two children each, so we were a dozen cousins, all of us close, visiting on weekends, dining together, celebrating holidays together, going to sleep-away summer camps together. After learning about Veal “Sklootini,” I contacted my surviving cousins and asked if they remembered seeing my mother cook. One wrote to say, “We never were at your house for dinner, so that would make me a distant observer on the matter.” Another said nearly the same thing: “I don’t think I ever ate in your home.” What’s more, she added, “I truthfully do not remember ever going there.” A third wrote that he smiled when he saw the name of the dish, but “I could never imagine her cooking it because I never saw her in the kitchen.” He might not be the best person to ask, he said, because—as my other cousins had also said—he didn’t “remember spending too much time in your house/home/apartment.” A fourth, my oldest cousin, said she didn’t even remember our apartment. And a fifth wrote, “I never heard of Lillian lifting so much as a toothpick.”